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What more can we do to help our academies collaborate effectively?

Through advances in technology, there’s a new generation of powerful online applications designed with collaboration and the classroom environment in mind. Collaborating across multiple sites and geographical locations can be difficult yet vitally important to ensure that your academies work collectively to share cost efficiencies, best practice and resources.

Communicate without geographical barriers

A range of effective cloud-hosted online platforms from providers such as Apple, Google and Microsoft enable academies to communicate without geographical barriers. Choosing an online platform for your trust will allow staff to access policies and documents from any location; not being prohibited by the academy server systems.

Allow academies to collaborate effectively

Whether it’s a shared project between students in different academies within your trust or communities of your teachers, users are now able to work and collaborate in ways not previously possible.

Historically the choice available to students when it comes to devices and applications that are used to support their learning in the classroom has been limited with cost, ease of use and technology limitations are all contributing factors. Barriers are now being reduced through a wealth of educational tools and resources such as Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Office 365 all of which can be accessed through a single cloud portal, RM Unify.

Make the most of technology trust-wide

Whether your academies use of Office 365, are 'Going Google', or are using a mixture of both, RM Unify gives you access to these educational tools and many more through one consistent interface with one username and password.

Alongside offering trust-wide access to educational resources, RM Unify offers each of your academies the ability to make individual choices about the resources they want to use. The online applications available can be used to address key educational issues such as improving literacy standards, attainment tracking software, progressive maths applications and classroom management systems and much more - all plugged into a trust-branded interface.

What more can
we do to help
our academies
collaborate
effectively?

Cloud management & personal device monitoring

With more BYOD schemes being introduced and the rise of devices in every classroom it is more important than ever that you have a clear strategy for managing and monitoring devices to ensure your students stay safe online.

RM has tools which provide monitoring, collaboration functionality and controls for internet usage, enabling teachers to conduct lessons in a productive, focused and safe environment. From real-time keyboard monitoring, to application monitoring and control, and viewing student screens RM has the tools to support you.

Now that technology is being so regularly used in the classroom it can be difficult to decide what will have a positive impact on the classroom and not become a distraction. We offer a number of different options for training and support to give you the skills, knowledge and confidence to make the most of your technology.

We offer educational and technical CPD covering Google, Apple and Microsoft and other technologies, helping you to make the most of your existing technologies or supporting you in choosing the best solution to integrate with your existing systems. We also offer online safety consultancy to ensure your staff, pupils, parents and governors feel more confident in today’s online environment.

Senior leaders of multi-academy trusts are responsible for the safety and well-being of their community. It is therefore essential to have systems in place which can support this, to give you the confidence that your staff and learners are safe across all of your academies

There are many tools available that can help you standardise online safety across all your academies, so you can ensure consistency in approach and produce the right reports to satisfy Ofsted.

One of the biggest barriers to using ICT is staff confidence, however the people with the most knowledge are often carrying out manual tasks to make sure everything is working, and this often takes up most of their day.

Did you know that around 60% of your ICT issues can be fixed remotely? By selecting proactive support contacts for your academies you can free up the time of your technical team and focus their efforts on supporting teaching and learning in the classroom.

Network solutions

As a Trust you want to find cost effective solutions that will mean technology just works across all of your academies. We offer impartial and independent advice, across a wide range of leading technology brands, to help you put in place the right infrastructure that can harness current and emerging trends.

RM Integris

Trust-wide data view

As a senior leader in a multi-academy trust you need to know how your academies are performing, this can be challenging when individual academies are using disparate systems and there is no easy way to pull the data into a trust-wide central view. Producing this data in a manageable fashion can be expensive and time-consuming.

A new feature coming into RM Integris very soon is a dashboard which pulls together essential information such as attendance, behaviour and attainment for all your academies into one place. This will enable you to immediately identify areas of concern and look at opportunities for staff development. For example, where one academy has an area they are preforming well in they could support the other academies in the trust.

RM Integris

The management information system (MIS) is the backbone of your academies, providing you with all the vital information about your staff and students. However, this no longer needs to be hosted by on-premise hardware which is expensive to manage and hard to access from multiple locations. The way we work today demands the need to access systems at anytime from anywhere. A cloud-based MIS will give you this freedom yet provide you with the confidence that all your data is safe and secure.

Consider the cost savings when you remove the need for an admin server, the warranties and the onsite maintenance. This aggregated up over the number of academies in your MAT could result in significant cost savings.

RM Flex

Having an ICT partner that manages all your ICT support can provide a consistent service across all your academies, ensuring they all have reliable and well managed ICT to support their teaching and learning needs today and in the future. Support services such as RM Flex provide you with a mix of onsite engineer time, remote fixes, and proactive checks making sure any issues are fixed quickly and efficiently. Not only this, it has been proven that by outsourcing your support you can save at least 15% on your ongoing ICT costs.

One key benefit for an academy joining a MAT is to be able to collaborate and learn from others, this can be made easier if they have the same access to technology. A robust broadband connection is essential in enabling this. Not only will your teachers need to use the latest innovations in teaching and learning but they will also need to communicate easily and share best practice across the MAT

RM Education understand how the internet is used in the educational environment and will be able to advise you on the best solution, now and for the future, and because you’re in a group of schools we can provide better value for money through aggregated contracts and economies of scale.

One of the benefits of being part of a MAT is the opportunity to share resources between academies. Cloud collaboration enables you to easily share trust-wide policies and procedures, encourage teaching staff to work on shared lesson plans or contribute to group forums and facilitate shared working groups across the Trust with your students.

RM Unify is an online portal that makes it easy for your academies to work collaboratively regardless of geography.

The initiative whereby each pupil gets a device for themselves can often lead to better collaboration and interaction between pupils as each pupil has access to whatever they need at the time they need it. 1:1 devices opens up classrooms to greater flexibility and collaboration which is often not possible when students are sharing computers.

We have extensive experience of designing and validating ICT equipment for use in education. We have tested and selected a range of products for use in schools. These products have been checked by RM and we offer a range of training and consultancy to support the successful implementation of them in your school.

View our case studies

We have been working with a range of multi-academy trusts across the UK to support them in overcoming their individual challenges and issues. Find out about the work we have been doing by reading some of our case studies below.

Westerings Primary Academy

This small Primary Academy in Essex invested in Google Apps for Education. Read how this saved them time and money and improved collaboration and learning experiences..